Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

This form of correspondence nearly always ended in disappointment. I slowly began to realize that it’s best for those first dates to happen in real life rather than in written form, otherwise the disparity between who you imagine the other person to be and who they actually are grows wider and wider. Many times, I would invent a person in my head and create our chemistry as if writing a screenplay, and by the time we’d meet again in real life, I’d be crushingly let down. It was as if, when things didn’t go as I imagined, I’d assumed he would have been given a copy of the script I’d written and I’d feel frustrated that his agent obviously forgot to courier it to him to memorize.

We stole traffic cones that piled up in our living room. We picked each other up and threw each other around on club dance floors. We talked about sex like it was a team sport. We were puffed up on bravado and rodomontade; and we operated with ruthless honesty and zero competition with each other, often boring each other’s prospective conquests senseless with long, drunk lectures about how amazing our friend was.

I refilled my plastic cup with Glen’s vodka and a splash of Coke and stomped up to Diana’s bedroom. For two hours, we shouted at each other. We started very loud, then got quieter, until finally we were too pissed and tired to carry on and we made up. I told her she had abandoned me; I created a complicated metaphor about how I’d realized she’d always viewed me as Björn Again. “WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?” she shouted. “Björn Again. They were the warm-up band for that Spice Girls gig we both went to. They were shit and we couldn’t wait for it to be over. I’ve realized I’ve just been your warm-up act for eleven years until your headliner came along. Well, you’ve NEVER been my warm-up act, you’ve ALWAYS been my Spice Girls and I wish I’d known sooner so then I could have put you down the bill and MADE YOU BJÖRN AGAIN.”

You are moving out of the realm of fantasy “when I grow up” and adjusting to the reality that you’re there; it’s happening. And it wasn’t what you thought it might be. You are not who you thought you’d be.

“The Amorous Shepherd”

I tried to imagine what it would feel like to find a sense of security in the person you went to bed with—a notion that was so foreign to me. I looked at the small gaps in between all their bodies and imagined the places that lay between them; the stories they had written together; the memories and the language and the habits and the trust and the future dreams they would have discussed while drinking wine late at night on the sofa. I wondered if I would ever have that with someone or if I was even built to float in a sea of love. Whether I even wanted to.

I realized that places are kingdoms of memories and relationships; that the landscape is only ever a reflection of how you feel inside.

“What are you trying to control?” “Everything,” I said, realizing it as I said it out loud. “I’m trying to have a hand in everyone’s opinion of me. How everyone behaves toward me. I’m trying to stop bad things happening. Death, disaster, disappointment. I’m trying to control it all.”

“I vow to always let you grow. I’ll never tell you that I know who you really are just because we’ve known each other since we were kids. I know you’re going through a period of big change and I’ll only ever encourage that.”

I thought about an article I had read about premature death after Florence died; the one in which an advice columnist advised a grieving father not to think of the life his teenage son would have led had he not been killed in a car crash. This fantasy, she said, was an exercise of torture rather than of comfort. “You know, that life isn’t happening elsewhere,” I said. “It doesn’t exist in another realm. Your relationship with that man was seven years long. That was it, that’s what it was.”

know.” “Your life is here, now. You’re not about to live a tracing-paper copy of it.”

no matter what we lose, no matter how uncertain and unpredictable life gets, some people really do walk next to you forever.

I thought of how I’d only fallen more and more in love with her the older we grew and the more experiences we shared. I thought about how excited I always am to tell her about a good piece of news or get her view when a crisis happens; how she’s still my favorite person to go dancing with. How her value increased, the more history we shared together, like a beautiful, precious work of art hanging in my living room. The familiarity and security and sense of calm that her love bathed me in. All this time, I had been led to believe that my value in a relationship was my sexuality, which was why I always behaved like a sort of cartoon nymphomaniac. I hadn’t ever thought that a man could love me in the same way my friends love me; that I could love a man with the same commitment and care with which I love them. Maybe all this time I had been in a great marriage without even realizing. Maybe Farly was what a good relationship felt like.

I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event, and the backing singers. And if this is it, if this is all there is—just me and the trees and the sky and the seas—I know now that that’s enough.

You are the sum total of everything that has happened to you up until that last slurp of that cup of tea you just put down. How your parents hugged you, that thing your first boyfriend once said about your thighs—these are all bricks that have been laid from the soles of your feet up. Your eccentricities, foibles, and fuckups are a butterfly effect of things you saw on telly, things teachers said to you, and the way people have looked at you since the first moment you opened your eyes. Being a detective for your past—tracing back through all of it to get to the source with the help of a professional—can be incredibly useful and freeing.

I would love nothing more than to conduct a sort of literary salon in which all my beloved friends bring their comfort blankets from childhood to the table and we discuss the gender identities of all of them. I would, believe it or not, find that completely compelling.

Get a Brazilian wax if you want a Brazilian wax. If you don’t, don’t. If you like feeling bare and you’ve got the money to spend, get waxed all year round. Don’t ever get one for a man. And don’t ever not get one for “the sisterhood”—the sisterhood doesn’t give a shit. Volunteer at a bloody women’s shelter if you want to be useful, don’t spend hours debating the politics of your pubic hair.

No practical matter is important enough to keep you in the wrong relationship. Holidays can be canceled, weddings can be called off, houses can be sold. Don’t hide your cowardice in practical matters.

You should never take any advice from a sassy, self-help school of thought that makes the man the donkey and you the carrot. You’re not an object to be won, you’re a human made of flesh and blood and guts and gut feelings. Sex isn’t a game of power play—it’s a consensual, respectful, joyful, creative, collaborative experience.

my useless superpower is a propensity for needless nostalgia. I have an unerring ability to metabolize, ritualize, and memorialize the passing of time at breakneck speed so everything becomes a grand moment in history within a year of it happening.

Nostalgia was originally diagnosed as a sickness. In the 1600s, the word was coined to describe an acute physical pain that Swiss soldiers experienced when they were in the lowlands of Italy and yearning for the alpine vistas of home.

“I’ve started to really understand the phrase ‘the passage of time,’” Helen told me in the wake of her thirtieth. “It’s like this long corridor I’m walking down, and the farther I go, the more doors slam that I can’t access.” After Helen painted this metaphor for me, I saw doors slamming everywhere. Young writers’ programs I was no longer eligible for. Clothes and clubs I decided were no longer appropriate for me. I read a leaflet on menstrual cups in a waiting room and noticed they had two size options for the under thirties, and just the one larger size option for thirty-year-old women and over.

David Foster Wallace understood the sonorous sound of slamming doors down the passage of time. Aged thirty-three, he wrote: Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.

The thing I am nostalgic for, the thing that had me crying on a stranger’s doorstep on Camden Road surrounded by Sainsbury’s bags, is not the life or identity of my twenties. It is the sense of being a time millionaire—having oodles and oodles of options. I will forever mourn the teenage and twenty-something feeling of being a proprietor of endless empty minutes; of having boundless days ahead of me. I think, whatever age I am, I’ll always be searching for stacks more of it.

“I don’t want the brain of my twenty-one-year-old self. Or the impulses or the bloody . . . inner turmoil. I want everything I have now—I want all the lessons I’ve learned and the experiences I’ve had and to know all the stuff I know. But I want to transpose myself back to the physical state of being twenty-one forever, with all my life ahead of me.” “Right.” “Basically, I want my mind and my soul to keep aging but I want my body never to get old and perish,” I said, pouring the last dregs of the rosé into our glasses. “I feel like we should be granted access to youth alongside the wisdom of age.” I knocked back the wine. “Do you know what I mean? I suppose that’s what everyone feels, don’t they?” “No, no, I think it’s a totally brand-new idea,” India replied flatly. “You’re saying you think youth is wasted on the young. I think you’re the first person ever to realize that, Dolly.”